His award-winning 2002 Milton Studies essay, "De Doctrina Christiana and the Question of Authorship," asserts that many hands (including amanuenses and translators) contributed to the tract, and he goes so far as to suggest that Milton's own role in its writing will forever remain speculative.

Lieb claims that the dispute regarding the authorship of De Doctrina is anticipated by the treatise itself, since the God it proposes is rooted in conflict, with the very proof-texts forwarded to substantiate his being themselves requiring "a kind of archaeology of interpretation" (44), since different versions of the Bible make appearances via the hands of different amanuenses.

The Cornell Yeats, an exemplary edition which has already progressed through seven volumes of the poems and four of the plays, lays bare not only the author's own revisions, as well as his hesitations, false starts and about-faces, but also those inadvertent alterations wrought by the hand of chance: words or phrases or whole lines swallowed up between fair copy and proof; misarrangements of sequences; and worst of all, the pious intentions of the author's amanuenses, especially his wife.

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